Making Comics, meeting McCloud

My name is sticky. It sticks in people’s heads, and they come up to me at conventions and stuff and say “Oh, yeah, you’re Avram Grumer” when I have no idea of who they are, so I’m at a permanent social disadvantage.

How sticky is my name? Yesterday I went to Midtown Comics for Scott McCloud’s signing of his new book, Making Comics. Now, I’d never met McCloud before. We’ve had no social interaction out of a couple of letters I wrote to him twenty years back when he was doing Zot!. And it’s not like I’ve ever done anything in the world of comics that might draw attention to my name. But when I told him to make it out to Avram — “You’re not Avram Grumer, by any chance, are you?”

The book is fantastic, by the way. I’m about halfway through. The sections on facial expressions and body language are probably the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a better book than Understanding Comics was, though probably of use to fewer people.

Today was the book’s launch party at Rocketship, a cool new comics shop in Brooklyn. I’d never been, but now I wish I lived in Brooklyn again. It’s not large, but the selection is good, and it’s brightly-lit and the walls are decorated with original pages by some local comickers. It looks like the sort of place that doesn’t make you ashamed to be a comics fan. And, unlike any other comics shop I’ve ever seen Rocketship gives first priority to the books — the trades and hardcovers, collections and graphic novels. The nasty pamphlets, rather than being given a massive spread of wall-space, are dismissed to below-waist-level shelving (with a few small wall or standing racks). Oh, and there are minicomics by the cash register.

I saw goraina there, and a friend of ladymondegreen’s (“Wait, I know you, Avram, right...?”), and got to chat with both Scott and Ivy McCloud, who are both super-nice and smart and funny, so yeah, go see them when they swing around to your state. (That’s Sep 14 and 16 for you Cambridge, MA people, and Sep 26 for Boston.)

“A symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together”

Y’know how the writers at The Onion sometimes seem to be just going through the motions? And sometimes the headline is funny, but the article itself isn’t worth reading? Well, the latest issue has one of those pieces that’s great all the way through: “Five Years Later: NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole”:

“Let this circle of flowers — brief, beautiful, and too soon gone — symbolize the respect we have shown for the memories of those innocents who lost their lives on that sorrowful morning by creating this great hole,” said the Reverend Charles Bourne of Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Chapel as the flowers sank into the brown, debris-strewn runoff at the bottom of the cavity. “I firmly believe, as does every person here, that this deep, empty hole has come to stand not only for the New York City of today, but also for the transformation of the entire United States since Sept. 11, 2001.”